After a decade of partisan sniping over tax breaks enacted at the dawn of the George W. Bush administration, the Senate overwhelmingly approved a plan to extend them beyond Dec. 31, voting 81 to 19 to keep the cuts in place for families at all income levels for another two years. ...

In a statement celebrating the Senate vote - his first big bipartisan victory since Republicans strengthened their hand in Congress in the November midterm elections - Obama exhorted House members to set aside their concerns and support a package he described as "a win for American families, American businesses and our economic recovery."

"I know that not every member of Congress likes every piece of this bill, and it includes some provisions that I oppose. But as a whole, this package will grow our economy, create jobs and help middle class families across the country," Obama said. "As this bill moves to the House of Representatives, I hope that members from both parties can come together in a spirit of common purpose to protect American families and our economy as a whole by passing this essential economic package."

"This great American middle felt cheated by our politics for most of the last 30 years," I argued. "In liberalism it saw a creed that demeaned its values; in conservatism it saw a doctrine that shortchanged its interests."

I still like those lines, so what's my problem with these neo-restive-majority types?

The basic difficulty arises from a false equivalence they make between our current "left" and our current "right." The truth is that the American right is much farther from anything that can fairly be described as "the center" than is the left.

When a president of the United States is attacked simultaneously as an "extreme liberal liar" and a "Nazi," there is a sick irrationality at work in our discourse.

...large parts of the right have moved to positions that Ronald Reagan didn't dare take, or abandoned in the name of realism: voucherizing Medicare, partially privatizing Social Security, insisting that the New Deal represented an unconstitutional power grab...

So successful has the right been in dragooning the discourse that President Obama's health-care plan, a rewrite of middle-of-the-road Republican ideas from 15 years ago, is condemned as radical.

The few Republicans present were admirable people driven from their party by the right wing. ...Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida ran for the Senate as an independent. They were joined by New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, the ex-semi-Republican...

Moderation, very much alive on the center-left and among Democrats, is so dead in the Republican Party and on the right that even a staunch conservative such as David Frum, a former George W. Bush speechwriter and No Labels co-founder, is an apostate. He was too quick to raise questions about Sarah Palin's qualifications and dares to think that Republicans need to get serious about problems such as health care.

The No Labelers can yet be a constructive force if they remind us of how extreme the right has become and help broker an alliance between the center and the left, the only coalition that can realistically stop an ever more zealous brand of conservatism. But they will have to admit that labels aren't the real problem. What lies behind them is.

It’s too early to know how Judge Vinson will decide—there are some differences in the challenges—but ObamaCare defenders are clearly worried that he will issue a similar ruling, meaning double trouble for ObamaCare.

It’ a good sign that the U.S. health care system may survive President Obama’s determined effort to remake it; but it’s an even better sign that the U.S. Constitution will survive the Democrats’ determined effort to ignore it.

The Rasmussen polling firm has chronicled the public’s long-standing opposition to the legislation.　 On the day of Hudson’s ruling Rasmussen reported, "Most voters have favored repeal of the law every week since it was passed and support for repeal has now inched up to its highest level since mid-September."

The elitists will concede that many (most?) of the early political fights in the fledgling republic were over the limits of federal power.　 With Thomas Jefferson leading the charge for the Democratic-Republicans (which later became the Democrats), they challenged numerous Federalist laws on the grounds that they were unconstitutional and violated the Tenth Amendment’s assertion that, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

But the Democratic Party is now controlled by liberals who believe that battles over the limits of federal power are over and that big-government won.　 Hence, when soon-to-be-ousted Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was asked about the constitutionality of the individual mandate, her only response was "Are you serious?"　 The idea that the Constitution might keep her from legislating anything she wanted to legislate was ridiculous—until now.

The fact is that neither Democrats nor the Obama Justice Department ever gave a thought to the idea that they would need to defend the constitutionality of ObamaCare—that’s just not something elitist liberals worry about.　 And so they never scrubbed the legislation and their defense of it to make a consistent case—a fact highlighted by Judge Vinson of Florida in a statement last October.

As PBS reported at the time: "Vinson chastised Democrats for what he called ‘Alice-in-Wonderland’ tactics [ouch!]: saying during the debate over reform that the penalty leveled on people who do not buy health insurance was not a tax, but then calling it a tax in their legal defense of the mandate."

While we don’t know where this will all end up, here’s a pretty good bet: Most or all of ObamaCare will be neutered, (1) by judges or the Supreme Court, or (2) by states that refuse to accept the law or try to bypass it, or (3) by members of Congress who are listening to the public.

Those aren't lame ducks in session on Capitol Hill. They're dead ducks, but like chickens that can still take a few steps once their necks are wrung, these dead ducks are flailing and flapping across the barnyard, leaving a trail of blood and gore.

The Democrats of the 111th Congress, which can't die soon enough, still can't wrap their minds around the November election returns. They can't figure out how humiliating repudiation could have happened to such wise and wonderful folk. The decks of the Titanic she helped steer into the iceberg are awash in icy water, and Nancy Pelosi is desperately ringing Room Service to demand her morning coffee.

President Obama, who finally may recognize his own parlous condition, begs for Democratic votes for the tax compromise, pleading that if he can't get them, his presidency will be finished. Joe Biden, the dotty vice president in the attic, snarls at Republicans to "get out of the way" so the Democrats can get on with the work of destroying themselves.

The Gallup Poll finds that just 13 percent of Americans think Congress is performing the job those 535 slackers were elected to perform. Rasmussen finds that just 23 percent of Americans think the nation is "moving in the right direction."

Nancy Pelosi, the gift that just keeps on giving, is the leader of the Democrats who revel in their ignorance of how things work. A reporter for CNSNews.com asked her, ever so respectfully, "Where does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?" Mzz Pelosi, momentarily flustered and bereft of talking points written out by her staff, was stumped.

"Are you serious?" she asked. "Are you serious?"

Yes, the reporter replied, he was.

Mzz Pelosi shook her head, clearly puzzled by the premise of the question, and turned to take a softball from another reporter. She later sent out her press spokesman to reaffirm the notion that asking her where and how the Constitution authorizes Congress to mandate that individual taxpayers buy insurance was certainly not a serious question. "You can put this on the record," the spokesman said. "That is not a serious question." He repeated the answer, disbelieving he was saying something so silly. "That is not a serious question." But the law, with the mandate, is on track to the appeals court, and the Supreme Court is likely to decide whether the question is a serious one.

Mzz Pelosi, untutored in constitutional law, continued to argue the "not serious" question with press releases, arguing that if Congress says it's so, it must be so.

The hole that Barack Obama finds himself in, while largely due to his policy positions, is also a function of his seeming out of his league, a man-child who was elected to an office he was unprepared to hold, perhaps the only candidate for president who made Sarah Palin look like an experienced and worldly statesman in comparison (and who continues to perform that remarkable feat today).

Obama is not offering much new in the way of policy -- fortunately for the nation, still suffering from a tremendous bout of indigestion over Obamacare, cap-and-trade (being implemented by the EPA regardless of lack of congressional action), Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and his failed effort to shutter Guantanamo Bay (because Muslim radicals in Yemen will hate us so much less if their Mohammedan brothers are kept in frigid northern Illinois instead of their current Caribbean resort).

So now we have Barack "Peter Principle" Obama walking up to a hastily-called press conference with Bill Clinton who is probably thinking that Hillary might have an opening to run in 2012 despite all her protestations and who is therefore glad to do anything that boosts the Clinton name while damaging Obama at Obama's remarkably naive invitation.

And it would have been bad enough if Obama ceded the stage to Clinton but stayed in the room and answered questions at the end. But instead, he said "I've been keeping the First Lady waiting for about half an hour, so I'm going to take off..." to which Bill offered the helpful response "I don't want to make her mad, please go." We can all be our own screenwriters of the tragicomic lines representing what he was really thinking...

So, let's get this straight, Mr. President: The fate of a tax measure that is of critical import for an economy with a near-10% unemployment rate, a measure that will impact directly or indirectly a 9-digit number of Americans, and a measure with political ramifications potentially as large as Obamacare's is to be left in the hands of an ex-president (did I mention "ex"?) because your wife is waiting?

The political naïveté of Barack Obama is becoming, even more than his far-left agenda, his political Achilles' heel. ...

Obama's weakness is America's gain, though perhaps not as much as it is Bill Clinton's gain.

I taught at CSUF for 21 years. I think it fair to say that the predominant theme of the Chicano and Latin American Studies program’s sizable curriculum was a fuzzy American culpability. By that I mean that students in those classes heard of the sins of America more often than its attractions. In my home town, Mexican flag decals on car windows are far more common than their American counterparts.

I note this because hundreds of students here illegally are now terrified of being deported to Mexico. I can understand that, given the chaos in Mexico and their own long residency in the United States. But here is what still confuses me: If one were to consider the classes that deal with Mexico at the university, or the visible displays of national chauvinism, then one might conclude that Mexico is a far more attractive and moral place than the United States.

So there is a surreal nature to these protests: something like, "Please do not send me back to the culture I nostalgically praise; please let me stay in the culture that I ignore or deprecate." I think the DREAM Act protestors might have been far more successful in winning public opinion had they stopped blaming the U.S. for suggesting that they might have to leave at some point, and instead explained why, in fact, they want to stay. What it is about America that makes a youth of 21 go on a hunger strike or demonstrate to be allowed to remain in this country rather than return to the place of his birth?　

I think I know the answer to this paradox. Missing entirely in the above description is the attitude of the host, which by any historical standard can only be termed "indifferent." California does not care whether one broke the law to arrive here or continues to break it by staying. It asks nothing of the illegal immigrant — no proficiency in English, no acquaintance with American history and values, no proof of income, no record of education or skills. It does provide all the public assistance that it can afford (and more that it borrows for), and apparently waives enforcement of most of California’s burdensome regulations and civic statutes that increasingly have plagued productive citizens to the point of driving them out. How odd that we overregulate those who are citizens and have capital to the point of banishing them from the state, but do not regulate those who are aliens and without capital to the point of encouraging millions more to follow in their footsteps. How odd — to paraphrase what Critias once said of ancient Sparta — that California is at once both the nation’s most unfree and most free state, the most repressed and the wildest.

Hundreds of thousands sense all that and vote accordingly with their feet, both into and out of California — and the result is a sort of social, cultural, economic, and political time-bomb, whose ticks are getting louder.　

In 2006 ten freshmen Democrats marched into the Senate, propelled by a wave of popular outrage at the Bush administration.

Fast forward four years.

Nine members of the same class voted Wednesday to extend the signature policy of the very administration they once vowed to take on, joining 24 fellow Democrats up for reelection this cycle in supporting the measure, which passed easily 81 to 19. Democratic first-termers from states where Republicans made major gains last month, including Sens. Claire McCaskill, Jon Tester, Jim Webb, and Sherrod Brown, voted in favor of the package.

It’s a stark change from the 2006 cycle, and a signal of how 2012 Democrats hope to avoid the same shellacking their party endured this November, after Republican campaigns slammed them for the liberal policies passed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.